VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 1
How to Put Out the Fire
Read this first, before anything else in this chapter.
If you have just come through the first volume, you are not reading this calmly. The fire from those pages has reached you. You are still breathing, but it has left you scorched, and somewhere inside you a cold voice has started to say the worst thing it knows how to say: you are finished, there is no saving you.
That voice is lying to you. This entire chapter exists to prove it wrong.
So let me tell you plainly what this chapter is, and what it is not. It is not theory. It is not a lecture on economics or the law. It does not ask you to understand the whole crisis tonight, or to fix anything, or to be strong. There will be time for all of that later, in the chapters that follow. Right now there is only one thing that matters, and this chapter does only that one thing. It gets you, the person, back alive, back steady, and back on your feet, out the door.
Think of it as emergency first aid. When you pull someone out of a burning building, you do not sit them down and explain how the fire started. You check that they are breathing. You get water into them. You keep them warm. You tell them, again and again, until they believe it, you are going to be okay. That is all this chapter is. Six sections. Six buckets of water, poured over the fire on you, one at a time.
The first bucket shows you why, in the eyes of every law ever written, a machine cannot stand where you stand, and why what happened to you was never your fault. The second shows you why you deserve to eat and sleep and live, not because you are useful, but simply because you are a person, the same reason a three-year-old child deserves it. The third holds up a mirror and shows you something you have forgotten, that you are not scrap, you are a champion, one who won a race against hundreds of millions before you were even born, and who has carried through every hard thing life has thrown since. The fourth shows you a road almost no one has ever shown you, the one where there is finally enough for everyone, a road real people are already walking right now. The fifth takes the two words you are most afraid of, laid off, and turns them over, so you can see what is actually underneath them. And the sixth walks you to the door, tells you the honest truth about how much time is left and how hard the road ahead really is, and puts into your hand the one thing the people before you never had.
You do not have to hold all six at once. Take them one bucket at a time. As each one lands, the fire dies down a little, and you can lift your head a little higher.
And if, before any of that, tonight is simply too heavy, if that cold voice is louder than these pages, then set the book down and reach for a person instead of a page. Tell one person you trust what you are carrying. In the United States you can call or text 988, any time, day or night, and someone will answer. The book will still be here tomorrow. You are the thing that matters here, not the book.
But if you can stay with me, then stay. Let us light the lamp and begin. By the end of this chapter the fire will be out, your breath will come easy again, and your eyes will be open. And then, only then, we set out.
Contents of This Chapter
One. The Law Protects People, Not Machines
Two. You Are a Person, and Every Law on Earth Is There to Protect You
Three. You Are Still Alive Today, Which Makes You a Champion
Four. There Was Never Only One Road
Five. You Were Not Laid Off, You Were Let Out
Six. The Fire Has Already Started, but There Is Still Time
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.